Cars fill up the courthouse parking lot and more are Lexuses instead of pickups. Businesspeople in suits join locals at popular lunch spots. And at the town’s only shoe shop, steel-toed boots are pushed aside so workers can polish pairs of black and brown loafers that arrive all at once.

Marshall may be a small town in far East Texas, but in the world of patent litigation, it has been a giant. The Eastern District of Texas — which includes a federal courthouse in Marshall — draws more patent cases than any of the 93 other districts in the U.S. Of all patent cases in the country, 1 in 4 were assigned to a single Marshall judge in recent years.

Downtown Marshall's federal courthouse has drawn attorneys from some of the biggest tech companies in the country.

(David Woo/The Dallas Morning News)

But that patent docket could soon slow to a trickle. A Supreme Court decision Monday limits where patent cases could be filed. That means, ultimately, many of them would move out of East Texas.

Outside of Marshall, many would welcome the change.

There have been rumblings that Marshall is too friendly to those wanting to bring frivolous patent cases. So that’s why, some say, it is often chosen by those so-called patent trolls trying to make a quick million suing big corporations.

Before the court’s ruling, patent cases could be filed wherever the plaintiff chose if a company had sales there. But the plaintiff in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC challenged that interpretation of the statute, arguing that plaintiffs should be allowed to file only in the district where a company is incorporated or where the company has significant operations.

As the patent docket fades away, so will a chunk of the Marshall’s economy. Fewer attorneys will pay to stay in the hotels clustered near Interstate 20, put catered meals on their expense accounts, and spend thousands on printers and office furniture to be delivered by the truckload to rented “war rooms.”

But perhaps more important, the thing that put Marshall on the map will fade away.

Before patents, Marshall was known for its cotton fields, railroad stop and its status as the birthplace of boogie-woogie. But due to a quirk of history — and a lot of good old-fashioned gumption — the town’s once sleepy federal courthouse has for more than two decades been a hub for lawsuits over patent infringement. It has been serious business for lawyers who work for big-name companies from Facebook to Google, who have all come calling on local juries to help settle billion-dollar cases over intellectual property.

Stormy Nickerson, executive director of the Greater Marshall Chamber of Commerce, has raised her five children in Marshall. She introduces local business people to one another at the chamber's coffees and luncheons.

(David Woo/The Dallas Morning News)

Now with that all threatened, Marshall may attract fewer lawyers, but locals say there are other draws to this small town -- such as nearby fishing at Caddo Lake or the annual winter festival.

Stormy Nickerson, executive director of Greater Marshall Chamber of Commerce, pointed to a recent barrel-racing and calf roping event at Josey Ranch that filled up hotels. And she said, a hardware distribution center announced it's opening in town.

"Good things are really happening," she said, adding that patent lawsuits or not, "we are going to keep serving the people who come here."

Marshall, a town named after John Marshall, the nation’s fourth Supreme Court chief justice, is determined not to have its fate sealed by a high court decision.

The historic Harrison County Courthouse is in the town square in Marshall.

(David Woo/The Dallas Morning News)

Small-town life

Marshall is about 150 miles east of Dallas, near the Louisiana border. The town of about 24,000 people is dotted with white and pastel-colored historic homes in various stages of repair, neat subdivisions and country homes on large, sprawling plots of land. In the middle of town is a public square with Harrison County’s 117-year-old yellow-brick courthouse at its center. The courthouse, restored through a multimillion-dollar townwide effort, serves as overflow for federal cases on busy days.

Its population has held more or less steady since the 1950s, but it has faced small-town challenges such as attracting retailers to shuttered storefronts, fending off brain drain to the big cities and bringing life back to abandoned historic buildings around town.

In its early days, the cotton industry fueled Marshall’s wealth and its growth. By 1850, about 12,000 people lived in Harrison County, and about half were slaves. Riverboats on Caddo Lake took cotton and crops to Shreveport and on to New Orleans. In the 1870s, the town wooed the Texas and Pacific Railroad Co. headquarters with bond money. The town became a stop on the route to San Francisco.

Today the town is home to four higher education institutions, including a technical college, but many Marshall residents work on factory floors or in oil fields. Only about 20 percent of Marshall’s population has a bachelor’s degree or higher. The town’s median household income is about $36,000.

The top three employers in Marshall are Eastman Chemical Co., which has a Longview manufacturing site that makes products used in food preservatives, cosmetics, toys, paint and automobile interiors; Trinity Industries, a manufacturer that makes highway guardrails, barges, railroad cars and other industrial construction; and Good Shepherd Medical Center, Marshall’s hospital and health care system. The three companies employ nearly 3,200 people, according to the Marshall Economic Development Corp.

How it all started

Marshall began to emerge as a patent battleground in the 1990s, when Texas Instruments heard it could get speedier patent trials about 2½ hours away from its headquarters. At the time, the Dallas-based chip maker had filed a number of patent lawsuits against rivals who used patents without paying for licensing.

In Dallas, Texas Instruments had been waiting for years for its day in court. In Marshall, there were few criminal cases that cut the line and slowed the patent docket. The district judge in Marshall — then Judge T. John Ward — had also adopted rules and timetables that kept cases moving. By the early to mid-2000s, word got out that Marshall had a “rocket docket” and even more patent cases came to town.

Several attorneys in town switched their area of focus to the town’s new cottage industry: patent litigation. Some expressed shock at the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision and were still digesting what it meant this week.

Sam Baxter, a top patent attorney in Marshall, has an office building immediately next to the federal courthouse. He’s a principal for New York-based law firm McKool Smith. He’s represented clients including Ericsson, Medtronic and TiVo — and won some of them multimillion-dollar verdicts.

Sam Baxter, a principal in McKool Smith's Marshall law firm, said Marshall became a patent litigation hub because of the court's speed and efficiency.

(David Woo/The Dallas Morning News)

For now, Baxter said, Marshall will have a pipeline of cases. But long term, he’s not sure what role the district may play. He predicted that the docket may drop off as much as 70 percent.

“It’s going to take a year or maybe two to find out what the ramifications are,” he said.

Michael Smith, another Marshall patent attorney, has kept a blog about the Eastern District’s patent litigation for about 13 years. He said he’s skeptical Marshall residents will feel the economic impact of the patent docket fading away — unless they’re in the tourism or catering business. He said the bigger hit will be to intellectual property law firms in Dallas, Houston or other big Texas cities that have sprung up to support the Eastern District.

Smith has seen the tide turn before for law practices. He began his career in personal injury law, an industry mostly put out of business by Texas tort reform.

And now, lawyers may have to switch gears again. “The legal profession is always looking for what is the next field,” he said. “Is it retirement law? Is it copyrights?”

Growing notoriety

As its patent docket grew over the years, journalists from as far away as The New York Times and the BBC profiled the town’s unlikely claim to fame.

But the glare of attention wasn’t always flattering. Some critics said the town was trying to boost its economy by attracting the cases. Others said jurors in the Eastern District weren’t sophisticated enough to decide the outcomes of patent cases, which tend to involve complicated and highly technical inventions.

The impact of the patent docket manifested in unexpected and sometimes odd ways.

Out-of-town companies began renting empty offices, in the hopes of appearing to have East Texas ties. A hotel bought a subscription to PACER — an electronic docket that monitors federal court cases — to track upcoming trials and sell rooms to attorneys. An attorney for California DVR-maker TiVo bought a steer at a town livestock auction.

Samsung sponsored the ice skating rink at the town’s major annual holiday event, the Wonderland of Lights Festival. The South Korean consumer electronics company also rented a booth at Marshall’s annual Fire Ant Festival. Next to booths selling trinkets and fair food, Samsung handed out high-dollar electronics as prizes, such as DVD players.

Marshall patent attorney Carl Roth said he's felt the town's days as a patent hub were numbered. He said big corporations want lawsuits to be filed in districts that give them the upper hand.

But Carl Roth, a Marshall patent attorney who’s practiced law for 52 years, said he’s heard crazy rumors about his hometown too. He’s had to correct out-of-town attorneys who’ve asked about the town’s five-star restaurants and four-star hotels. (The town has neither.)

He said he doubts the strange publicity stunts swayed residents or shaped courtroom outcomes — especially since the town made up just a fraction of the total jury pool.

“Nobody noticed it but the lawyers,” he said. “The lawyers died laughing.”

Hungry lawyers

Deb and Rob Sorich own Central Perks in downtown Marshall. The restaurant serves soups, sandwiches and other lunch fare that you’d find in a typical American cafe.

Rob and Deb Sorich run Central Perks, a café in downtown Marshall that serves lunch fare. Most of their business comes from locals, but they have gotten a bounce from law firms who order catering.

(David Woo/The Dallas Morning News)

Deb and Rob say they didn’t anticipate the business bump that came from patent attorneys who began ordering meals, sometimes for a week or more. She’s gotten used to big city tastes and fussy diets.

In April, for example, she juggled a catering order for a law firm that needed 10 days of breakfast, lunch and dinner for 20 people. She came up with numerous different entrees to appease her guests, from chicken Florentine with capers to mahi mahi with mango salsa.

But the new clientele came comes with a downside. The couple had to rewrite their catering contract to include a clause guaranteeing that a law firm would cover grocery costs if it settled the case before all meals were served.

Even before Marshall’s status as a patent lawsuit venue was challenged, the Soriches say they took precautions to make sure the business didn’t rely on that revenue stream. They saw the way the number of lawsuits could ebb and flow.

“You get a big case coming in town, but it’s like a roller coaster,” he said. “Sometimes, they don’t come in town for months.”

He said they saw the catering as the “cream on top,” extra money to stash away for retirement savings. Neither has set foot in the federal courthouse just a few blocks away.

What it means

For critics, the high concentration of patent cases in the Eastern District indicated a broken system and a court that attracted patent trolls who used legal action to extort quick, lucrative settlements.

Even some Texas politicians were in favor of shutting down Marshall’s patent business. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 16 other state attorneys general wrote an amicus brief, siding with large companies like Intel and eBay in the case. In the brief, Paxton and his colleagues slammed the previous interpretation of the patent venue statute, saying it allowed plaintiffs to “forum shop” or choose courts more likely to deliver a favorable outcome.

Advocates of the Eastern District, though, said the court set the standard for efficiency. They say the speedy trials reflected judges’ patent expertise and discipline that kept trials fast, yet fair.

Roth, the Marshall patent attorney, said big companies just sought to wipe out the Eastern District, so they would have a home court advantage.

“The average juror who shows up in our court doesn’t know what Google or Cisco does,” he said. “They’re just another big company. They have no ax to grind. ... By and large, I think the parties on both sides start out even because the juries are not familiar with either party.”

And Roth said the ruling may just end up moving the high concentration of patent litigation rather than sprinkling it around the country. Many lawsuits may land in Delaware, a popular place for companies to incorporate because of tax law, or Northern California, home to the tech-saturated Silicon Valley.

Enduring effects

Even if Marshall loses some or all of its patent business, there still remains the subtler impact of its years as a prime location for lawsuits. Some of Marshall’s patent attorneys — such as Sam Baxter and the law firm McKool Smith — have become well-known civic leaders, who help underwrite town festivals or support other local efforts.

The Texas Pacific Museum is framed by the window of the historic Ginocchio Hotel in Marshall. The former luxury hotel, completed in the late 1800s, will open later this year as a restaurant, bar and event space.

(David Woo/Staff Photographer)

Patent attorney Alan Loudermilk purchased and refurbished the old Coca-Cola bottling plant in Marshall. He turned the upstairs into a loft, where he lives part time.

(David Woo/Staff Photographer)

One of Alan Loudermilk's favorite features of the Ginocchio Hotel, a building he and his business partners are restoring, is the curly pine woodwork of its stairs. He imagines bridal parties posing for photos there.

(David Woo/Staff Photographer)

Alan Loudermilk became enchanted by Marshall’s charming but neglected century-old buildings when he came to Marshall for a patent case in 2009. Instead of renting an office, the 58-year-old patent attorney and engineer bought a former Coca-Cola bottling plant that had become a dilapidated mosquito breeding ground.

“You’d walk down the street, and mosquitoes would eat you alive,” he said “But for me, it was ‘Wow, what a beautiful building. It’d be a crime for this to be torn down.’ ”

He converted it into his company’s office and a loft where he lives part-time.

He started Boogie Woogie Beer, a nod to the style of piano-based blues first played by black laborers who cut trees for railroad ties in the East Texas woods. A Dallas brewery makes the beer, but Loudermilk plans to move operations to Marshall.

Loudermilk and a business partner are restoring another abandoned historic building: The Ginocchio Hotel. The 121-year-old Victorian hotel, located just off the train tracks, was built for Charles Ginocchio, an Italian immigrant turned railroad tycoon. When the luxury hotel opened in the late 1800s, it became one of the grandest establishments along the railroad, and it drew visits by President Harding, Taft and Wilson, according to newspaper accounts from the time.

They’ve already invested more than seven figures to replace the leaky roof and gutters, cut away rot and rebuild missing pieces of the original stained glass windows. By end of year, he plans to open the restored hotel as an upscale restaurant, bar and event space where he imagines families going out to dinner and wedding parties posing on the hotel’s elaborate, curly pine stairs.

Loudermilk bumps into familiar faces at restaurants and at the grocery store — the town’s “good, decent, hard-working folks.” He’s grown weary of attorneys or outsiders who simplify Marshall as a place full of “country bumpkins” who hand out big verdicts.

“They don’t appreciate the depth of history and culture that’s here,” he said. “They just perceive it from the window driving to the airport to the hotel and back, with the courthouse in between.”

Loudermilk came for the patent courts, but now he’s invested in the town and can’t imagine leaving.

“The Coke building’s still here, the Ginocchio’s still here, I’m still here,” he said.

Besides, he said, he’s got his eye on other overlooked buildings in town.